ABSTRACT
Arid landscapes have been constructed in many forms over the past two centuries. As landscapes of the mind, they take shape through the collection of senses that structure experiential space. As landscapes of ideology, they have been manipulated by power interests from the British and French colonial empires to Saddam Hussein, from the settlement hopes of western pioneers in the USA to the visions of ecotourist planners, from the certainty of scientific interventions to the chaos of social transformations. As landscapes of opportunity, drylands have been invented and reinvented by wave upon wave of interests, from exclusionary conservationists to enthusiastic ecotourist operators. As landscapes of Edenic dreaming, they have been painted as a romantic frontier, a space where mind and heart converge. As landscapes of distress they have been associated with the hurt and disruption of forced removals, from native American communities to Aboriginal Australians, from the San people in Botswana to apartheid victims in South Africa. These are spaces ruptured by multiple constructions, by multiple heterotopias, and by multiple realities, yet they retain a magnetism that is tangible, albeit elusive.
